Friday, March 18, 2011

trying to make some frontpage drive-in news

Done. DONE done. I sent the manuscript to my agent half an hour ago. I intend to do a proofreading pass in a week, once the dust has settled and I can see again, but unless my agent or my lovely, wonderful beta readers raise any red flags, there are no major changes left to make. That means that Madeleine and Ferguson can ride off into the sunset where they belong, and I can start discovering new and clever ways to torture my next characters (Ellie and Nick - you should learn their names, as they'll be the stars of my life for the next few months).

As you can guess, today was basically all work and no play. I went to the gym first, where Alyssa assessed my progress over the past four weeks. It wasn't quite as bad as I expected -- while the scale said I gained a pound, Alyssa calculated that I lost two pounds of fat and gained three pounds of muscle, which isn't bad considering that I've spent the last three weeks eating like crap and sitting for twelve hours a day while trying to finish this book. I'm going to get back on the horse next week (where horse = elliptical machine), but this weekend is a vacation.

After the gym, I grabbed lunch, dropped off some more paperwork for my CPA, got a pearl milk tea (sans pearls) since I was already on Castro Street, and then came home to do battle with the manuscript. I took a break around seven to eat, and then I took a nap because I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, but I finished. The best task was using Scrivener to identify words I used a lot, and then scouring the manuscript to remove them. I ended up cutting 50ish uses of seemed, 42 suddenly, 35 certainly, and a whole slew of perhaps, rather, likely, utterly, and exactly. Yes, I know, you're jealous of how exciting my life is.

The saddest part of today is that I saw no one who could appreciate my new tshirt, so I will have to link to it. The site is pretty great, but only if you like all things Iowan. Some of the other shirts on the site include 'Des Moines: French for The Moines', 'We Built Sioux City on Rock and Roll', 'Don't Meth With Iowa', 'I Went to the Iowa State Fair and All I Got Was Type 2 Diabetes', and 'Everything's Greater in Slater' (hint to the Slater crowd who reads my blog). Yes, I know, you're now even more jealous of how exciting my life is.

Okay, I really should sleep -- I'm going to take an impromptu trip to see Terry, but since I haven't slept so much recently and haven't packed yet, I need to go to bed if I'm going to get up in time tomorrow. Goodnight!

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